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Driving an Electric Car Shows You Care

RUSH: When I was out in California, I think I mentioned this to you. I was out in California a couple, three weeks ago, and I hadn't seen some of my buddies for a year and a half. And it's amazing. If you lose touch with people, a year and a half, I mean, they can change, and you don't know about it. I mean, sometimes you gotta stay in close contact with people to keep 'em on the rails.

So one of our haunts, we go to the Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills. It's great. I mean, you've got TVs in there. If there's a football, basketball, baseball game on, it's in there. You can smoke while you have dinner. There aren't too many places in the country you can do that anymore. They've got balconies outside, patios and decks if you want to go outside, keep the doors open. It's just heaven, for those of us who appreciate fine adult beverages and cigars.

And I'm in there with some of my TV buddies, producers and writers of famous TV shows. Oh, by the way, they all were just gung-ho for Christie. Remember, I told you this. They were mad at anybody who'd been critical of Christie. Well, if they were mad at me, they didn't specifically say they were mad at me, but they got their point across. "Look, Rush, who else are we gonna win with? There's nobody we can win with. What, Cruz, you kidding me?"

I said, "I think Cruz could clean up."

"Come on, you gotta be kidding. You really, come on, Rush. You know Christie's the only chance we got."

So I just sat there, and I'm listening to it all. I tell you, it's a learning, it's an absorbing thing for me. And they're passionate about it, serious about it. But then one of them said to me, "Rush, I gotta tell you something." And he was not afraid to tell me, but he was of the opinion that I was gonna jump down his throat.

He said, "Rush, I'm buying an electric car. But I'm not buying it 'cause I'm a environmentalist nut, Rush, it's none of that. No global warming. It's just the greatest car in the world. It's just the finest car. I'm gonna buy a Tesla, model S. Rush, I can go 300 miles on the thing with a single charge."

I said, "Well, does it have a gasoline engine if you run out of the juice?"

"No, but at 300 miles I'll never run out."

I said, "Well, where do you charge it?"

"My house, overnight, 300 miles, hell, it's only 40 miles to and from work, my commute. This is great, and it's the finest car, Rush, it's the biggest selling car in California. Right now it's one of the most popular cars in the country."

And I said, "That's great, if that's what you want. I don't care. You don't have to justify it to me. If you like it that's cool."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's not because I'm an environmental nut, Rush. Don't think I'm doing this 'cause I'm trying to save the planet. I went up to San Francisco and I test-drove one, and I ordered it."

I said, "You don't have it yet?"

"No, no. It's coming in December."

So, with that in mind, I have two stories. The third Tesla caught fire the other day in the past month. They're not sure what the cause of the latest fire was. Don't know if it's the battery, some such thing. They're doing an investigation of it. I didn't call the guy. I didn't say, "Hey, did you see where a third Tesla..." I mean, I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it now because people love the car. It has its evangelists. You know, I'm a big Apple guy. It's got its fans, and no matter what you're not gonna talk 'em out of it, and I wouldn't try to talk them out of it. (interruption) Look, no, Snerdley. (laughing) Fire in the cabin, it's a great car.

My point is if somebody wants one, that's fine, I'm into free choice. As I've said over and over again, I think a lot of people buy these things for the same reason they wear a red ribbon, to say they care, and they care more than you do and they're socially conscious and they're saving the planet. I hate people being hoodwinked by that stuff. Why is it... I'm afraid to bite on that. Why is it... No, because if I ask the question I'm gonna be compelled to announce your answer, and I'm not here to begrudge Tesla, at all. See, this is the big difference in me. The pro-electric car people, they're close to demanding that all of us drive these things.

I mean, the leftists on this, they end up liking the electric car, they want everybody in one. They like vegetables, you have to eat 'em. They don't like 32 ounce soft drinks, you can't have them. They don't like trans fats, you can't have any. And that isn't me. If somebody wants to buy a Tesla, what are you gonna say? Your car can become the grill and you can grill your food when you're camping? Campfire jokes.

This Elon Musk guy who is the CEO of Tesla, he's actually quite entrepreneurial. He's got all kinds of great entrepreneurial ideas, space and ramping up mass transit, highway travel, and this kind of thing. He's a forward thinker. And I applaud entrepreneurs, like this guy in New Orleans that I learned about today, Larmondo "Flair" Allen, a great treasured entrepreneur in New Orleans that sadly died in 2004 in a housing project, gunfight over drugs. But they finally found the guy that killed Larmondo. The guy that killed Larmondo also killed Larmondo's friend, Chocolate, 30 rounds in this guy's head. Big drug deal. Anyway, the entrepreneur aspect of Larmondo "Flair" Allen is he's 25, he's got nine kids, and they each earn about a hundred grand a year, and they don't have a job. It's a fascinating story.

Anyway, when I was thinking about this, the Tesla news and my buddy telling me he couldn't wait to get it, I'm just wondering if he's affected by this. Then there's this story from Grand Rapids, Michigan. The TV station there, Channel 13 Watchdog News, WZZM, the Watchdog News team started out to do a story prompted by viewer questions about the use and the cost of public car charging stations. They investigated and they found that the charging stations were just one very small part of what is, when you add it all up, a massive government effort to get everybody to drive electric cars. I'm reading to you from a TV station report.

"President Obama set a goal to have one million electric cars on the road by 2015. We're now at 10% of that number, and despite that, the government continues to prop up the manufacture and sales of electric cars beginning with lithium mines and ending with electric vehicle charging stations." The bottom line here is that this TV station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, now granted, this is in auto country and you might find an allegiance to the standard automobile industry there, so you have to account for that in the story, but they claim that $5 billion is being wasted on this whole electric car program.

I mean, they chalk this up as yet another massive failure by the Obama regime, and it's just another in a long and never ending list of failures. "Perhaps the most definitive indicator that electric car sales are not where the government wants them to be, President Obama has asked Congress to increase the electric car tax credit from $7,500 to $10,000. To date, the federal government has spent $28 million on lithium mines for the batteries, $27 million on lithium salts, $2 billion to battery factories, $3 billion to automakers, $7,500 credit to car buyers, now up to 10 grand, and $15 million to install car charging stations."

Now, the point is that the government is spending all this, not the electric car industry. The regular car industry is not getting this kind of government help other than GM being bailed out. But the point of the story is that nobody, in terms of real numbers, wants these, and yet it's true, Obama does want everybody driving. This is my point. Why does he care? You know, Algore dreamed of everybody having an electric car. Do these people not understand that you cannot have an electric car without massive coal powered, coal-fired power plants? Where do you get the electricity to charge them?

I'm sorry, this is where things break down for me, just sort of common-sense things. People think that electric cars -- well, where do they start from? They start from, "Regular cars pollute, oh, yeah. Greenhouse gases, CO2 and C20 and C-3PO and catalytic converters and gasoline and fires and they stink and it smells, and it's pollution, and oil, yuk. It's oil and polluting and oil spills and it's profit for the oil companies." They get lost in all this. Then they say, "Now, the electric car, now, that's clean, yes siree. There's no pollution. There's no noise," and so forth. Where do you get the electricity to power the car? You get it from coal, which Obama is trying to do away with.

So how are they gonna power these things? This why I don't understand. People think they're buying an electric car and saving the world, and yet it takes their number one enemy, coal, to have enough electricity to charge these things. Sometimes I don't know how people think. But that's why I think there's this political attachment to it, sort of like wearing the red ribbon for AIDS. You care more than other people, like when you're driving a Prius or what have you. It just shows how malleable people are and how susceptible they are to doing things.

First you can guilt them into making them think they're responsible for climate change and pollution, and then you say, "But here's a way you can say you're sorry. Here's a way you can make amends. Here's a way that you can be forgiven." And you go out and buy one of these hybrids or an electric car, and you agree to pay higher taxes and accept your portion of the blame for everything and you'll be forgiven and you'll be a good person. I don't understand that working on people, but it does. The psychological play is profoundly successful.